Aimee Herman's Blog, page 40

day 5: admittance.

I admit it was never the cats. And I’ve only been part of a gang of humans protesting body’s rights, but never part of a gang that initiates through bartered bruises. I admit it had nothing to do with the boy. Or the girl. Or that time that time. I can’t tell you who taught me, but I promise I never instructed another. I admit I’ve done it since the first time and I’d be lying if I told you there is a��last time.

I admit this is not my real hair color. But what is really��real on bodies?

I admit that I finally believe that the word love is not a noun��or a verb. It is too bold to be a��part��of speech; it is the��whole thing.

I admit that I sometimes write in library books because I have a difficult time not getting involved with words.

I admit I lie about my weight. And sometimes my age. And the strength of my wrists.

I admit I hold deep conversations with myself in the bathroom. And when I walk toward and away from places.

I admit I am difficult to learn. How could anyone possibly get in if��I��barely have entrance.

I admit I never really forgave you.

I admit that the most beautiful sight I have ever seen is the moon on a Friday after that evening nap and the moon when it still exists in the sky during early morning and the moon on Wednesdays when it is at its fullest figure and the moon when it reminds me of the fingernail I have torn off, which dangles between my teeth.

Filed under: WRITING | rambles Tagged: "aimee herman", admittance, body, cutting, love, moon, poem

day 4: visible.

As if we could scrape the color off the iris and still see.��� ��…Maggie Nelson, Bluets

This music is a trampoline and I am jumping my way into it.

Have you ever wondered what a body would look like out of tune?

Lightening can be like an alarm clock to the soul.

I want you to tell me what you see when you look at me.

Three hands on piano keys on a saturday before 10pm and a tongue burns from earl grey elixir.

Kind of like what I imagine Winter to be.

You can always press snooze.

Tricky. Matted. Smell. Leaflet. Groan. Hunted ��ing. Blue. Draft.

Filed under: WRITING | rambles Tagged: "aimee herman", body, Maggie Nelson, music, poem, visibility

day 3: exposure

���The more you���re exposed to different narratives, and the more you see there���s not one way to be anything, the more you question and interrogate your own way of being in the world.��� ��……Thomas Page McBee

No one asked. There are no messages inquiring. But I still feel the need to answer.

because my button-down collared shirts look so much better resting against my parts.
because I know they are mine but so are my fingernails and I bite them off every single day.
because as I get older, I am less inclined to pick a side.
because I never knew I had the option before.
because though it is uncomfortable, I feel more comfortable.��
because I thought I’d give it a try and it’s been over a year and I am more and more sure that it is right.
because we don’t have to comply with what exists on us just because we were “born” with these parts.
because sometimes they are so painful to look at.
because I feel closer to the “me” I have dreams about.
because I am interrogating my parts and finally taking notice of the hidden narratives on my body.

Filed under: WRITING | rambles Tagged: "aimee herman", binder, body, breasts, chest, gender, genderqueer body, Thomas Page McBee

day 2: silence the silent treatment

���To be wild is to make honesty primal, to not edit out the smell of spit and smoke and the street fruit. To be wild is to let my body levitate when you look at me the right way, when you hit me hard on the street, to be my mouth or my fists, or both���probably both. The wild don���t build fences; we let the worms and ivy and rats and love in.��� �� ……..Thomas Page McBee

Dear New York City,

So…..I am giving up on my silent treatment. I think we should talk. I think we should take a walk around Prospect Park and see if this relationship can be saved. Remember that time I collapsed against your sidewalk in Brooklyn and you stole my chapstick. And you took some of my blood and you shattered my chin, New York. And that beautiful woman took me to the hospital and nursed away my wounds. New York, it was all your noise which brought on my hysteria. And why is everything here so expensive and small?

Hold my hand. Let’s remember that time you led me into that sweet nap as I rested on thick tree trunk, collapsed onto grass. And when I woke, you surprised me with three turtles basking in the water beside me. You were trying to hint that you can be a hippie too.

I don’t mean to be so mad at you all the time. It’s just that sometimes your smells are less romantic and the fumes of urine and waste carve their way into me. It is difficult to escape.

You hate eye contact, New York, which I have a difficult time with. I want you to hold my gaze. Can you do that just this once?

New York, I am going to try not to think of other cities when I am with you. It’s unfair and doesn’t allow me to be present. I can’t truly be yours if I am longing for another.

Your rats will always frighten me. But your graffiti reminds me to be unafraid to look up and around. Art is everywhere. And you never cease to amaze.

Don’t let go of my hand, OK? Let’s give this another round.

Filed under: WRITING | rambles Tagged: "aimee herman", city life, city love, gratitude for city, New York City, poem, silent treatments

day 1. give up one ghost.

���The labor of being human is bearing one another���s ghosts. Energy cannot be created or destroyed, so we gather our losses into elevators and shoot up to the top floor, where we survey the city and they say whatever we want them to.��� ……….Thomas Page McBee

Dear Pen Pal,

I traveled into February and saw what you gave me. Thank you for the letter and the smear of pie. Thank you for the measurements which you spent 11 months calculating, allowing you to understand the distance between your ghosts and mine. Funny how many replicas of panic exist in people’s bodies. How many do we share and have you ever thought about covering them in glow-in-the-dark glitter. Maybe we can refurbish our ghosts into giant disco balls. We would no longer fear them. Instead, they’d cause us to remember how to dance and look around. And smile. I think my ghost might even ask you to waltz. Or twirl like lightning bugs. My ghosts are growing faint. All the neon in your body has caused all the rest of me to glow and forget all about the haunt(s) of what once was. And used to be.

Filed under: WRITING | rambles Tagged: "aimee herman", ghosts, penpal, poem, Thomas Page McBee

privacy.

How many people have the key to your innards?

Dear Rebel,
I have given away my yell. Do you know how often I swallow seeds made of improper chokes? What�����Let me pause a moment and rip up the shards of filament groping my tonsils.
��
Rebel, no one can be trusted these days, so I must speak to you in metaphor. Therefore, I’ve disconnected the wires holding me down like a well-trained dominatrix. These wires once connected me to you. And the one in Florida. And the music maker somewhere in Canada. And how is anyone going to know what I am��eating now or��angry about?
��
More importantly, how will I know how��LIKED I am if there is no thumb beside my words to press and remind me I am good.��
��
Rebel, I play my ukelele and title��chords I don’t know the names of. One is titled G-invert. Another is called��C misbehaves and walks, slowly, out of the room.��
��
Rebel, when I play these chords, no one is listening but the mice��hiding inside the walls of this Brooklyn apartment. Or the 3 year-old who lives with his folks on the top floor and he just may knock and ask to sit beside me. What I am trying to say is that this music is echoing like instrumental dust into my rooms and no one is telling me to continue. No one is telling me I am out of tune.
��
So…..if we do not share our latest WIN or fancy MEAL, does it still exist? Did it really happen?
��
Rebel, how many friends do you have. Now, write that number down. Tell me their middle names. And can you list their allergies and what pills they prefer. Do you know which ones used to be happy and which ones are visiting versions of “god” each week to find the answers? Now when you have that number down, how many of those friends have seen your home? How many of them know what keeps you indoors sometimes. How many have you shared a meal with or pot of tea?
��
We seem to be collecting friends these days. Last week,��I overheard someone say:
I have 400 likes! And I’m nearing a thousand friends! Hashtag (#) LUCKY! (This was all spoken)
��
Rebel, I have a friend who lives in Minnesota who (sometimes) sits beside me when I poem; this friend is you. I have a friend in Brooklyn who has fed me when I cried so hard my body lost track of all its salt. It could only bend and barely stand. WAIT……
��
What defines “friend?”
��
Social media confuses us to believe a friend is someone who LIKES our outbursts. But how many of them rub our backs when we are engulfed in panic. How many will warm up a meal because rent removed all the money from skinny bank account and nourishment is just as necessary as breathing.��
��
Rebel, I told someone something and they told some others to get more LIKES and now I fear that this earth has turned into a giant game of telephone.��
��
Things are becoming twisted like intricate tree branches and perhaps I was born in the wrong time period. Perhaps I was meant to live in a time when privacy was encouraged,��and not a hinderance from making “connections” with others.
��
Will I disappear if I stop pressing things onto computer screens?
��
Will people forget I am a poet? Will��I forget I am a poet? Will the humans forget I am here?
��
Rebel, I��am battling the war of privacy in my head. Here, within this screen, I feel ok. I know you are reading. And so is my Dad. And maybe my pen pal.
��
I promise never to include a LIKE button.�� I want to remove the LIKE button and ask that you share words. Images. Questions. Or if you like something, let it push you outside. Let it call your friend so you can share your thoughts with them through voice contact. Let it tear out a piece of paper that you can fill up with your unraveled letters.��
��
We are spending too much time on these screens. And not enough time with the humans��who give��us something to respond to.
Filed under: WRITING | rambles Tagged: "aimee herman", connecting to humans, Dear Rebel, disconnecting from social media, poetry, Rebel Diaz, ukelele, unplug

how many versions of nude are you?

It was just after breakfast, though all that existed inside me��was half a mug of coffee with almond milk and a clementine. I was on my way to a place I never thought I’d enter: a giant building full of saunas, pools, rooms to sweat out and disrobe from the toxins tearing up our insides. I was beside one of my favorite humans, a writer with a similar soul to mine. She had been to this place many times, preparing me to��just bring my swimsuit to which I replied: I don’t own a formal bathing suit. So, I put something together that would permit me entrance into a swimming pool, and prepared to be cleansed.

At this place, the humans are given uniforms. I called them costumes, to permit the drag I was about to encounter. Pink shirt pressing against��unpressed chest. Shorts. Tiny green towels.

Men and women were separated. Men got the blue shirts and I asked aloud if there might ever be a time when a third option might exist. You know, for those unwilling to pick a side.

First, saunas. This space was absolutely beautiful. Each one looked like a hut and the temperatures varied from 120 degrees Fahrenheit all the way to almost 190. There was a pink salt room and one full of jade, containing calcium and magnesium with infrared healing elements. When it got too hot that no more sweat could exit my pores, we entered the freezer, which was only 40 degrees, but covered in ice.

As I sat, I thought of my body as a calendar. All the days that have been ripped up and X’d. Moments of significance. Moments of clarity. Living in New York City has caused some bruising. I could feel the colors lift out of my skin. It’s too dramatic to call myself healed, but I was beginning to feel less……unfurled.

We changed out of sweaty costume and into bathing attire. For me, sports bra and boxers with tank top to cover. We headed outside into the pre-Winter air toward heated pools with��massaging jets on every side. The water washed away the sweat. I watched some of my poisons float away. Then, back to changing room to remove wet suit from body.

We had worked our way toward��nude.

So….we take��everything off? I asked.

This is one of the reasons they separate genders. In the pools and saunas, everyone merges. But in the nude spaces, no mixing aloud. Though I would not use the words��deeply comfortable to describe my feelings toward being coupled with the��WOMEN ONLY space, I knew being surrounded by nude men would only deepen��my discomfort.

So, I disrobed completely and headed out.

I did not grow up in a household where nudity was celebrated. This doesn’t mean we were raised to be ashamed of our bodies;��I just always remember covering up. Wearing robe from bathroom to bedroom post shower. I was��never given a sex talk and there was NO internet back then. I had many questions back then (still do) and the times I was naked with friends were few and far between and always included��some level of perversity that we never talked about.

We entered the enclosed space full of various pools and saunas. Everyone was nude and although I was wearing my glasses, I tried not to��see too much. I was immediately brought back to high school locker room days before I knew I was gay. I only knew how uncomfortable I was��changing around other girls. Afraid they’d notice me peeking. Secretly comparing my body to everyone else’s. Wondering why mine looked so dissimilar.

In��this space, no one sucked in their protruding bellies. No one walked backward into the pool to shield others from cellulite or stretchmarks. There was no apology in these shared waters. We reveled in our various versions of nude in the most erotic and beautiful way.

I did my best to contain my stares. But it was difficult. I am so deeply in love with and��moved by��bodies. There were no six-packs. There were no air-brushed versions.��These bodies were real. Stunning, in fact.

Because I am��me, I searched for queer bodies. Though I started to wonder if anyone looking would even call��mine this word. At one point, I did feel stared at, but my friend suggested it might be from our combined tattoos. I suddenly realized, at that moment, we had the only skin that had been inked.

I did not think about my breasts all day until I put my shirt back on. Pink costume with sweat stains. I felt deeply aware of how full my chest felt. My nipples were trying to upstage me. I had no binder and my sports bra was wet. This is when I realized though there was a time I would channel my inner-hippie and walk around bra-less…..that part of me was no longer.

My breasts feel��enormous,��I said to my friend.��I am so used to pushing them down.

And I’m so used to you not having any, she said. I became further reminded in this moment of why I love her so much.��She sees me as��I see me.

Then I wondered, was I seeing those women in their nude as��they wanted to be seen? Unapologetic folds and exquisite excess. Wild and free. Is��this how they wished they’d be viewed with clothes on?

I cannot control the stares of others just as I have a difficult time controlling my own gaze. I struggle with how inconsistent my nudes are. I am far past my 20’s and I still have no idea how to be nude sometimes.

I��still am unsure of how I want to be touched.

My attractions and desires are shifting. My emotions are fumbling to control themselves. Sometimes, I am an inferno of question marks all guided at myself.

Maybe I need to be in more places like this….where nudity is not necessarily about sex but��healing and purging. Maybe��this��is how I will exchange some of my question marks with more permanent answers.

Filed under: WRITING | rambles Tagged: "aimee herman", gender, genderqueer, healing, nudity, poem, queer body, sauna, spa

doubt.

Media and prescription bottles tell me that the voices should not be encouraged. There should be consistency within the leak of our pensiveness. But where is room for doubt? On an evening in a basement full of so many books, I got paper cuts from breathing, I was told by a poet that “love is a place you can go for the rest of your life.” And I wanted to weep against my bruises. And I wanted to ask:��but how can you be��so sure?

I want to believe in a love that can exist far beyond the grey cloud thunderstorm cold shoulder puddle splashes. I want to believe in a love that makes room for silence and bad behaviors��and wrong turns and indigestion and allergic reactions and��doubt. It can be easy to find the right words on a Saturday or a Wednesday. In the heat of bodies curled like erotic perms, it can be easy to say “the right thing.” To choose the��right voice from within to give to another.

But convince me you’ve never pushed down a voice so far down that you choked. That you suffocated so many syllables, all that came out were gurgles of drown.

Convince me love is drawn on every map, so there is��no way of getting lost. How can you when there is a GPS on every fancy phone and most automobiles and if��you don’t know which turn to take, a pre-programmed voice��will.

Doubt is like seventy pounds of cheesecake in your gut and��you are lactose intolerant so no matter how delicious��this creamy was, you feel weighted; you feel confused by the asphyxiation in your brain.

Sometimes doubt is born out of its antonym:��conviction.

Sometimes these voices are so strong because they remind us of how potent life is.

I have spent more than half of my life unsure about mornings. I have used ropes and pills and drugs and silence and darkness and starvation to attempt an end of alarm clocks and open doors.

Doubt. It is a powerful mechanism reminding us the necessity to slow down,��hear these voices and weave gratitude into the wavering. Weave in the echoes of question marks.

Is this good? Is this healthy? Is this��right right now? Can I be present while living��like this?

I want to believe that doubt is a doorway toward a conclusion. I want to believe. I want to��want. I want to��remain.

 

Filed under: WRITING | rambles Tagged: "aimee herman", body, depression, doubt, love, memory, poem, sad

meant to wake up blooming…

Aimee Herman, Thomas Fucaloro and Todd Anderson will be reading at Unnameable Books in Brooklyn on Nov. 22nd.

Where?��600 Vanderbilt Avenue. Brooklyn

When?��7-9pm

But how much?��FREE!!! Though…..there��will be books by Thomas and Aimee for sale!

BYOB!!

Filed under: SHOWS | video, WRITING | rambles Tagged: "aimee herman", Brooklyn open mic, Brooklyn poetry reading, meant to wake up feeling, Thomas Fucaloro, Todd Anderson,

anne bancroft’s lipstick

She sat in front of me in a community room in a building which was once a school. The room was so bright, I could��hear the visibility of every freckle on my skin. We were alerted that the poetry reading was going to begin shortly. I can’t recall who made the first move. I think it was��her who turned around and began asking me questions.

“Are you going to read something?” she inquired.

“Uh, yeah,” I answered nervously.

My eyes studied the language of wax on her lips. A thick coating like winter wool of bloody red on her mouth. Some call it lipstick; I title it paint. And she was like a painting that I felt mesmerized by.

During intermission, which was after the open mic, she asked me about the human beside me, wanting to know if he was my boyfriend, if we were married, and where we lived. Her inquisitiveness was charming and I barely hesitated before answering each one.

At the end of the night, I told her how much she looked like Anne Bancroft. She smiled.

“In my youth, I looked like Audrey Hepburn.”

“Well, right now you look like Mrs. Robinson,” I quipped.

“I’d much prefer to look like Audrey Hepburn,” she insisted.

I looked at her and studied the age in her face. I wanted to see how many chapters I could read in her forehead and between her upper lip and nose in those minutes before the lights went out and everyone had to leave.

I wondered if she wondered about the stories in my skin or if I had revealed them��all during my poetry set.

“I’m glad I met you.” She interrupted my thoughts.

“I’m so pleased I met you as well.”

Earlier in the evening, the host of the night asked everyone to look around the room and lock eyes with someone they did not know. Then, we were encouraged to get up during intermission and speak to them. This is an opportunity to meet someone new, he said.

Anne and I had not locked eyes. And yet, she turned right to me and I to her.

I appreciated the motivation to learn a new human. This doesn’t happen enough. I didn’t get Anne’s phone number, nor did she ask to be��facebook friends (the current ways in which humans connect these days). Though I quite liked leaving, knowing she’d already turned into a poem inside me.

Filed under: WRITING | rambles Tagged: "aimee herman", Anne Bancroft, NYC Poetry, poetry, poetry readings